Hello and good morning to you,

I have a question for you to consider: when a room has regular teachers off unwell, casuals are in and what should feel familiar doesn't, what goes first? It is not the nappy changes, not the meal service, not the paperwork. It is the pause, the moment an educator reads what is actually happening on a child’s face and responds to that, rather than to whatever 'needs' to happen next. That pause is empathy, and the research says it is not a personality trait some educators have and others don’t. It is a skill, built through relationship, emotion regulation and practice.

Empathy often gets treated as something a child either has or doesn’t, rather than a capacity that develops through consistent modelling and support. New research is pushing back hard on that assumption, and it is landing at exactly the moment the sector can least afford to treat empathy as optional.

Why Empathy Isn’t Automatic

Poline Simon and Nathalie Nader-Grosbois, publishing in Child & Youth Care Forum in 2025, examined how emotional regulation relates to empathy across preschool-aged children and identified distinct profiles: children with stronger emotional regulation showed more consistent empathic responding across affective, cognitive and behavioural dimensions. The finding matters because it positions regulation as something that underpins empathy, not merely something that runs alongside it.

A 2025 review published in Infant Behavior and Development, synthesising 25 years of research on empathy development from birth to three, found early markers of empathic concern observable within a child’s first year of life, shaped substantially by the quality of caregiver interaction rather than fixed at birth. Empathy, in other words, is being built long before a child can talk about how someone else feels.

The Australian Childhood Foundation reports that nurturing empathy in the early years builds stronger mental health, stronger relationships and a lasting sense of social responsibility, findings the Early Years Learning Framework reflects directly in its outcomes around identity, community and wellbeing.

Put those findings next to a sector losing experienced educators faster than it can replace them, and the maths gets uncomfortable: the workforce is being asked to model a skill it has less and less capacity, minute to minute, to practise itself.

Three Ways to Protect Empathy This Week

1. Name the feeling before you name the fix

At the water play area or the sandpit, narrate what you see before jumping to solve it: ‘You look really frustrated that the bucket keeps tipping.’ Naming the emotion out loud gives children the vocabulary for what someone else might be feeling, the exact skill the newest research links to stronger empathic responding.

2. Regulate yourself before you ask a child to notice someone else

Emotional regulation and empathy move together, in educators as much as in children. Before stepping into a conflict at the home corner or the reading nook, take three breaths or a hand on your chest, whatever grounds you. A dysregulated adult has far less bandwidth to model empathy than a paused one.

3. Make empathy toward colleagues visible, out loud

Notice fatigue in a teammate the way you would in a child. ‘You look wrung out after that morning at the garden bed, I’ve got the next ten minutes, go take a breather’ teaches children empathy is something adults extend to each other too, not only something children owe the adults in the room.

A moment to reflect…

Who in your room, child or colleague, could use a moment of your full attention today, rather than a shared glance while you keep moving?

When did you last pause long enough to notice how someone else was actually feeling, rather than guessing from the outside?

Empathy modelled is empathy multiplied, for the children watching and the team relying on you.

How Personhood360 supports you

​Personhood360’s Planning Cycle Matrix helps you build intentional empathy moments, buddy check-ins, perspective-taking prompts, into everyday routines rather than treating them as incidental. Our professional development library includes short modules connecting emotion regulation to empathic responding, built for the minutes you actually have. Wellbeing tracking lets you monitor your own regulation alongside each child’s, because the research says the two are linked, for you as much as for them. Real-time family reporting captures empathy in the moment it happens, a child comforting a friend at the water play area, so families see it as it unfolds.

Book a free introduction session and see how Personhood360 can help your team build the empathy a stretched sector needs most, every day.

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With gratitude,
​The Personhood360 Team